Any member on Atlas Quest can make use of the chat rooms. However, you should use the latest, most up-to-date browsers for best results. One notable browser that does not work well in the chat rooms is Internet Explorer 6 (a.k.a. IE6). If you have this browser, you are strongly urged to upgrade to IE7 or use Firefox instead.

There are limits to the number of people who can use the chat rooms simultaneously to insure the Atlas Quest servers don't get overloaded. If you cannot enter a chat room because they're already full, just try again later. Eventually you'll get in! Most of the time, it should not be hard squeezing in.

The colors are assigned randomly whenever you enter the room from about 15 different choices. Once you've entered the room, you'll see a row of various colors near the bottom right corner of the page. Clicking on a color will change your color in the room. It may take several seconds for your color in the member's list to change. The old colors in the chat log will not change—only the newly posted chat messages will use the new color.

The last color you selected is saved as a cookie in your browser so subsequent visits to the chat room will use that same color until you've changed it again (or deleted the cookie).

It is possible to pick from additional colors, however you must know how to update the cookies in your browser manually. For most people, you'll just want to stick with the color choices provided.

If you want Atlas Quest to audibly notify you whenever someone enters the chat room, check the "Play Doorbell" button. This is useful if you enter a room with nobody in it because you can leave to other windows and keep surfing Atlas Quest (or the rest of the Internet) and not have to worry about missing someone who enters the room while you're looking at a different page. You'll hear them come in.

New messages in a chat room are added to the end of existing messages. After awhile, the messages get too long to fit on one page, so a scroll bar will show up allowing you to scroll down to the bottom to continue reading new messages. This gets very annoying very quickly, however, so when the auto-scroll button is clicked, Atlas Quest will automatically scroll the messages up so the last chat message becomes visible. If you want to look through old messages, however, you might find it convenient to turn the auto-scrolling off so you aren't taken to the end of messages automatically when you //want// to be higher up in the list of messages.

To keep things running fast and efficient, several limits are imposed on the chat rooms: * Only 15 people can be in any one room at any given time since it's hard for many people to keep up with the conversation if more than that are in it. * A maximum of 50 people can chat at any given time to insure the server does not suffer from overuse * Lurkers can only stay in a room for one hour before they're booted out to make room for non-lurkers. (If you are a lurker, however, you may reenter the room again if there's still space.) * You can only be active in one chat room at any given time. To enter a different chat room, you must first exit the one you are in.

Once you're in the chat room, you can type messages to send to others in the chat room in that long box near the bottom of the page and click "Send" when it's done. To exit the chat room, click the "Exit Room" link in the upper-right corner of the room. To open another page to continue visiting other places on Atlas Quest such as the message boards or to check your AQ mail, clicking on the AQ logo in the upper-left corner of the page will open My Page in a separate window.

Then there are the two control buttons at the very bottom of the page to allow the chat messages to auto-scroll or to be notified of whenever someone enters the chat room.

You'll also find a row of colors near the bottom right corner of the page. You can change your color by clicking on the color you are interested in.

At this time, you can't. Private messages are currently not supported. Perhaps someday, but not at this time.

There are no options for creating private chat rooms. They come as part of already existing member groups. You can see which chat rooms you have access to and can use at https://www.atlasquest.com/chat/ or by using the Chat Room widget on My Page.